Modern vehicles, such as cars, trucks, busses and other personal and commercial vehicles, have many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) installed therein, typically on the order of ten or more ECUs per vehicle. ECUs communicate with each other for sending and receiving control messages and system data over the internal Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. In addition, there is an OBD-II (onboard diagnostics, second generation) port connected to the CAN bus which allows a technician or other user to connect certain diagnostics devices to the internal CAN bus in order to perform functions such as retrieving information or reprogramming a specified ECU. Recently, researchers have discovered a number of cyber attacks which can compromise some ECUs (such as telematics ECUs) by leveraging the external interfaces to compromise an ECU, or reprogramming an ECU with a manipulated firmware through the OBD-II port. Potentially, an attacker could gain entrance through the OBD-II port, Bluetooth, cellular telephonic communication, a CD drive, voice control, or other port or peripheral connected to the CAN bus. Once an attacker gains control of a compromised ECU, the attacker can inject illegitimate CAN messages onto the CAN bus to control the vehicle.
The embodiments arise in this context.